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I\kif ^\\bj ilc\ MIKE WARD’S SMALL SCREEN
READY PLAYER ONE (12A)
STEVEN Spielberg is heading back to the future in this retrodrenched sci-fi.
As in Ernest Cline’s 2011 novel (which began our current 80s fixation), the film plays out in a virtual world called OASIS.
It is 2045, America has gone to the dogs and cutting edge nostalgia is big business.
James Halliday (Mark Rylance) – OASIS’s recently deceased trillionaire creator – left a challenge on his death bed… Find three hidden keys – or “Easter Eggs” – in his sprawling world and you can inherit his fortune and his company.
As Halliday was an 80s nut, the egg-hunters, or “gunters”, must know their stuff. Our teen hero Wade Watts (Tye Sheridan), is just such a chap.
Under the cover of his floppy haired avatar Parzival, he has been using his encyclopaedic knowledge to steal a march on Nolan Sorrento (Ben Mendelsohn), an evil businessman with an army at his disposal.
The virtual scenes are wildly inventive, slickly rendered in stylised CGI and packed with fleeting references.
The movie’s as spectacular as anything Spielberg dreamed up in the 80s, but his best films from that decade didn’t need to point to other directors’ work.
In fact, they often bypassed the head and went straight for the heart.
This one is fun, but I’d have liked a little more humour and a lot more soul. BATTLE OF THE SEXES (12) BACK in 1973, ex-Wimbledon champion Bobby Riggs, a shameless male chauvinist and one hell of a wind-up merchant, challenged tennis’s top female star Billie Jean King to a head-to-head.
King was 29, Riggs was 55, but Riggs insisted he’d win, claiming male superiority would always triumph on court.
“Don’t get me wrong,” he crowed. I love women – in the kitchen and in the bedroom…”
With Steve Carell and Emma Stone in the starring roles, this is the hugely entertaining story not only of that famous encounter, played at Houston Astrodome and seen by 90million people worldwide, but also of the circus surrounding it, at a time when the women’s game, routinely belittled by the powers-that-be, was just starting out on the long road to equality. INGRID GOES WEST (15) INGRID Thorburn, played to unnerving effect by Aubrey Plaza in this dark social media satire, is well and truly off her head.
She’s a full-blown online stalker, so obsessed by Elizabeth Olsen’s character Taylor Sloane – and by the puke-inducingly idyllic West Coast life that this woman has been Instagramming the hell out of – that she drops everything and ups sticks to LA, looking to worm her way into the unwitting Taylor’s life.
It’s at this point that Ingrid’s behaviour turns from potty to petrifying. LIES WE TELL (15) THIS promising if messy thriller stars Harvey Keitel as billionaire Demi.
But only for the first five minutes, then Demi drops dead. Co-star Gabriel Byrne, however, sticks around a whole lot longer, as Demi’s former driver Donald.
Following his employer’s death, Donald discovers he has one last job to do, to eliminate all trace of Demi’s relationship with Amber (Sibylla Deen), a troubled young woman from Bradford.
But soon he’s being sucked into the city’s murky, menacing underworld. WINGS OF EAGLES (12) THE true story of Scotland’s Eric Liddell, the legendary 1920s athlete seen taking Olympic gold in the classic movie Chariots Of Fire, continues here, picking up at the outbreak of World War Two.
Now working as a teacher and missionary in China, Liddell is imprisoned by the invading Japanese – and soon faces the toughest challenge of his life.